Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Ferrara

A Renaissance palace built for a diplomat holds the cargo of a vanished port. In Palazzo Costabili, the National Archaeological Museum preserves the finds of Spina, the Etruscan trading city that flourished in the Po Delta: Attic vases painted in Athens, gold jewellery, amber, and the wooden boats that carried it all through the lagoons.

Why it matters

Spina is one of the great revelations of Italian archaeology, and Ferrara is where it lives. The Greek-Etruscan port, active between the sixth and third centuries BC at the Delta's edge, was identified only in the 1920s, when land reclamation in the Comacchio valleys began disinterring vases, gold and wooden structures preserved by the mud. Since 1935, the state museum has exhibited these finds in Palazzo Costabili, a Renaissance landmark, so one building narrates Ferrara's golden age and the far older trading city whose harbour linked Greece with the Po valley.

What to notice

Two floors organise the story. The ground floor presents the city of Spina itself: its settlement, sanctuaries and writing, in the rooms beneath the frescoed Sala del Tesoro, where Garofalo's early-sixteenth-century illusionist vault competes with the exhibits. The piano nobile holds the necropolis: funeral assemblages from the Delta cemetery dominated by imposing figured vases from the workshops of Athens, black-figure and red-figure, among them cups signed by major painters such as the Painter of Pentesilea. Cases of gold, silver, amber and glass-paste jewellery show the wealth that the river trade carried. In the Hall of the Pirogues, two monoxyle dugout boats of the third and fourth centuries AD, recovered from the valley silt, make the vanished waterways physical.

Context and history

Palazzo Costabili was begun around 1500 for Antonio Costabili, the Este ambassador at the Sforza court in Milan; Biagio Rossetti designed it and left it unfinished, its grand courtyard with double loggia never completed to plan. The building takes its popular name, Palazzo di Ludovico il Moro, from the ambassador's famous master. The museum was founded in 1935 specifically to display the Spina discoveries, which had begun with the chance finds of 1922 during reclamation works and continued through the excavation of hundreds of Valle Trebba and Pega tombs. Twentieth-century arrangement gave the ground floor to the city and the upper floor to its dead; the National Picture Gallery's two surviving tondi from Tura's Roverella Polyptych, the Last Judgement and the Martyrdom of St Maurelius, also belong to the state collections displayed in town.